During the residency, we fired two wood kilns, and the results were some of my favorites I’ve gotten from any wood firing. Many of the pots have a palette that reminds me of the wildfire-smoke sunsets we experienced while I was up north, with a dusting of glitter over everything. This is also the very first time I’m making my woodfired pottery available online.

My sale will go live to the public on Friday, but I’m giving newsletter subscribers early access. You can find the work here:

shop

Here’s one of my favorite pieces, a giant orb vase made from the clay I dig in my backyard here in Burnsville, fired right up by the firebox, where it got some amazing ember action. So many colors on this raw clay!

I’ve been torn about how open to be about the financial hardships I experienced this past month. In the end, I’ve decided that one of the things I want this newsletter to make room for is the unglamorous and often stressful realities of making a living as a craftsperson, especially early on in that journey.

Right after I sent out my last newsletter, I got into my already twice-repaired car (new starter! new flywheel! new clutch! expensive!), now packed full of all my things, ready to set off for North Carolina, already several days later than planned. And again, the car wouldn’t start.

I brought it back to the shop, and after a third round of repairs, I was eventually able to get back on the road, a week after my scheduled return to North Carolina (many thanks to Henry and Virginia for graciously hosting me longer). But by then, I didn’t have time to make it to a big two-day craft show I was signed up to attend. The repairs ended up costing about a tenth of my annual income and depleted the emergency savings I’d built up over the past few years. Missing out on the market income I was anticipating didn’t help either.

I’m sharing this because I think it’s worth being honest about the challenges that come with this way of life.

If there’s a silver lining to missing that market, it’s that I’ve had time and energy to put together this online sale, and that this special body of work will be able to travel more widely into the world.

I’m glad about that. These pots mark a special chapter in my clay journey—my residency at Ceramics School was a highlight of my year even with the car troubles I had in Detroit. And I think these pots are beautiful. I hope they will find their way to people who will enjoy living with them.

Now would be an incredibly helpful time to purchase my work if you’ve been thinking about it. If you’re in a position to buy something, thank you. And if you’re not, sharing the sale with a friend or family member is also a meaningful way to support me right now.

Thank you for being here.

With gratitude,

Mel

Virginia and Henry started Ceramics School in 2019 as a pop-up in their friend’s art space. Now it’s one of the places that makes Hamtramck feel so special– a small community space with 60 members, 4 cats, 2 dogs, and an aquarium of fish, shrimp, and snails. Henry and Virginia live on the top floors of the building, while below is the street-facing community studio and the residency apartment beyond it. In the yard they have a food forest of fruit trees and shrubs, a little swimming pool that Virginia tends with love (I love being pool daddy, she says), and many kilns and pizza ovens. The big kiln, once described by a child they know as a castle of fire, is a double decker wood kiln that’s a lot like a Phoenix kiln in its 2-level design, but can be fired as a train/tube kiln (bottom chamber), catenary arch (top chamber), or both. Not many people build wood kilns in cities, so this one feels extra special and unique. They make having a wood kiln in the city work for them by firing it almost entirely smokeless (using the chimney passives for extra smoke combustion, and limiting the amount of fuel put into the kiln in regards to the airflow), and since it’s built on a skid it’s technically a mobile structure that could be moved, not a permanent one. Telling me all this, Henry said: it’s basically our giant grill.

Last week we fired the kiln together. I’ve been to many many woodfirings, and I’ll always remember this one as extra special– not just because we got incredible results, but for the vibes. The kiln doesn’t have a roof over it, so every firing Virginia and Henry set up what they call an outdoor living room under a canopy tent. There they installed a couch, side tables, brought down lamps from their apartment, and set up a coffee table with books on it and vases of flowers.

Henry went out the first day of the firing to pick up a typewriter which we used to record our kiln log. The log itself is one of the most special things to come out of any woodfiring I’ve participated in. It’s 13 typewritten pages long, full of the voices of all the people who were present over the course of the 3 day firing. For context, kiln logs are usually a page long and just record info like temperature, air, cones, damper settings, etc. This one documents the sound of the rooster in the overnight shift, how we named each individual log as we unloaded them from the trailer and made a chain to stack the wood by the kiln (I was at the end of the line stacking the wood- every time I received a log from Henry, he told me the names they’d been given at the front of the line– This is Messi and Divorce, or this is Your Mom, and this one’s My Mom). It tells what music was playing, what snacks we ate, who was monitoring the kiln and who was monitoring the stars, the barometric pressure, the struggles of learning to type and how to create an exclamation point using a keyboard that doesn’t have one.

The log is in many ways a picture into what wood firing feels like– a huge collective undertaking that could never be accomplished by just one person. And in many ways the log feels like a picture into the people that Virginia and Henry are, and the community they’ve created around them- so playful, affirming, and full of heart.

The unload was very, very good— we reduction cooled the kiln to create dark, moody surfaces, like the wildfire sunsets we’ve been having here, with surfaces that glitter.

Here are a few of the pots I’ve managed to photograph so far :)

A list of things that have brought me joy here:

The pebbles on the beaches of Belle Isle, made almost entirely made up of old bricks, concrete, slag, glass, asphalt.

How much excitement the big international ships bring Virginia and Taylor- every time one passes, they look it up on their phones and let everyone know where it’s heading.

Seeing my first Great Lake- how as we came through the tree lined path it opened up onto a beach that felt like the ocean. The wind whipped sand stinging my bare legs. I collected a towel full of beautiful granite and sandstone pebbles.

The cats here: Duckie, Junebug, Moon, and Artie. Artie is a blind orange cat who came as a kitten bonded with Moon. Moon’s name was originally Junebug when they adopted her, but they already had a kitten named Junebug. Sometimes when they’re together Henry calls them Junebugs.

Spending the first 10 days here with my partner Ethan, and getting to share a studio space together.

The music on the WDET radio station.

A visit from my friend Gloria who came and helped with the wood firing!

Backyard karaoke in Hamtramck Disneyland.

All the sweet handmade details in the residency apartment: little knobs shaped like dogs and handpainted tiles made by Virginia, and of course all the pottery filling the shelves in the kitchen.

Eating a ripe peach off their peach tree.

The way this studio is also a community of friends, and how I now feel like a part of this community too.

It’s the end of my last day here. I’m cleaning up and packing, after one last trip to Belle Isle, to check out the Piet Oudolf garden there and dinner with my new friends.

Thankful for my time here, and for places like this and people like this. Sending you all love in the ether.

-Mel

PS- you can learn more about Ceramics School and the residency program here on their website. They’ll be launching a fundraiser soon to expand their space- if you believe in artist run spaces like this, I hope you’ll follow along and contribute!

PPS- here’s a reminder of my upcoming workshops and sales:

8/15: Clay and Place: wild clay workshop, Burnsville, NC

8/19: Botanical Incense workshop in Spruce Pine, NC

8/22: Gather Art Market at Hearth Glass in Burnsville, NC

8/29: Ash and Earth glaze making workshop, Burnsville, NC

9/27: Turkey Wing Handbroom Workshop, Burnsville, NC

I may also do a small online sale after the August 22 market of my new woodfired pots, if I have enough left!

It’s been a week since I arrived in Detroit for my summer residency at Ceramics School, a community studio run by Virginia Torrence and Henry Crissman. Behind the studio is a small apartment where I’m staying for the month; above it is Henry and Virginia’s home.

The yard holds two wood kilns tucked among fruit trees, milkweed, and secret nooks, watched over by their three cats and two dogs. This week we’ve rebuilt a small wood-fired kiln, which we’ll fire tomorrow.

One thing about a residency program is that it takes you out of the world you’ve created and puts you into someone else’s. Here, I find myself thinking about all the different shapes an artist’s life can take, how in so many ways Henry and Virginia have created the dream that I and so many of us have had at one time or another— a collective arts space built around community.

I worked in the studio while they taught a beginner wheel throwing class and quietly admired the way they taught the class: with humility, curiosity, playfulness, precision. It reminded me how much I love communicating and sharing knowledge, especially knowledge of the hands. And how almost everything I know to teach, I learned from someone who showed me in a way I couldn’t forget.

It made me grateful that the life I’ve built for myself back in North Carolina includes teaching, and that I have a few workshops waiting on the calendar when I get back:

Clay & Place: Digging, Processing, and Making with Wild Clay (August 15) — Spend an afternoon learning how to identify, harvest, process, and make with wild clay, beginning with a trip down to the creek to dig clay straight from the ground.

Botanical Incense: A Beginner Workshop with Local Materials (August 19) — An introduction to crafting your own incense using locally gathered plants, resins, and woods. Everyone will leave with handmade incense, a take-home kit, and a ceramic incense holder made from locally dug clay.

Ash & Earth: Intuitive Glaze Making with Natural Materials (August 29) — This class takes an experimental approach to glaze making with ash, wild clay, and locally sourced minerals, focusing on curiosity, observation, and the expressive possibilities of natural materials.

Turkey Wing Hand Broom Workshop (September 27) — Learn the traditional craft of making an Appalachian turkey wing hand broom from broomcorn and tampico fiber.

Info and registration: https://www.melanierisch.net/workshops

I have so much to say about Henry and Virginia, this place, and my time here, that it deserves its own newsletter email. For now I’ll just leave you with a passage I found in one of the books on the shelves here in the residency apartment:

“I think of ways to make my time in the classroom like I’m making art, in some way. A vital lesson for me was learning that teaching is about communication. Lecturing doesn’t do it. You have to see the light in the students’ eyes; you have to see that they get it. If you don’t see the light, then you try another approach and then another.. I realized that this attitude—that you have to communicate—was filtering into my art. Teaching and art began to cross-pollinate, and one affected the other. I realized that art was about communication. I was learning how to communicate by teaching. In effect I was saying: the art I do is what I’m talking about in the classroom and vice versa, and they’re interchangeable”.

John Baldessari, from Being an Artist

I’m writing to let you know I have new pots available in the shop.

But first—the Toe River Arts Studio Tour was two weekends ago, and I was completely unprepared for how meaningful the experience felt.

People kept asking me how it went, and I kept finding myself saying that it felt like everything had been leading up to this. My mom on the phone asked, “You mean in your whole life?” and I laughed and said, “Well, maybe!”

What I meant was that so many separate strands had come together at once: the garden I’ve been slowly creating here and was able to share with visitors; the studio I spent so much time setting up last year with the help of friends; the relationships I’ve built in Western North Carolina, with potters, neighbors, and the larger community here; and the years I’ve spent assisting other potters with their own home sales and studio events. And now it was my turn.

I can’t fully express how much it meant to share that moment with — and with the help of — my friends/guest artists Lewis and Sam, and with my partner Ethan, who built a beautiful staircase connecting the road to the studio in the two evenings before the tour.

_{Sam Harley, me, Lewis Denver, and my cat Sorrel standing amidst my poppies.}

To everyone who came out during the tour weekend: thank you. I’m excited to do it again in November, and hopefully for many years after that. It feels special to imagine people returning year after year, watching me, my studio, and the garden grow and change over time.

I was pleased with the pots I made in the weeks leading up to the tour. I’ve been continuing the body of work that came out of my spring residency at Township 10, exploring the local materials around me as ceramic ingredients.

I’m still developing glaze recipes and clay bodies from locally gathered materials for functional work, so for now I’ve been mixing clay dug from my backyard with red stoneware to make a clay body that can stand up to everyday use. I’ve also been using a beautiful satiny white glaze alongside a new ash glaze made with wood ash from my friend Camille Cogswell’s Walnut Family Bakery. Camille is an incredible pastry chef and baker with a wood-fired bakery in Madison County, and it feels special that a little part of that place has made its way into these pots.

I’m writing today to let you know that I now have a selection of pieces available in my online shop.

Newsletter subscribers are getting first access before the sale opens publicly tomorrow at 3pm EST.

Shop the Sale

The shop update includes vases, mugs, jars, candle holders, incense holders, bowls, and a few larger serving pieces. All pieces are fully functional and built to last.

Thank you, as always, for following along.

—Melanie

This weekend, I’ll be opening my studio for the Toe River Arts Studio Tour, Friday–Sunday, June 5–7. I’m thrilled to welcome Lewis Denver and Samuel Harley as my guest artists.

It’s my first time being a stop on the tour and it’ll be the first time I’m really welcoming people into my new studio since all of the renovations I did last fall with the help of so many friends. After a lot of work insulating, hanging plywood walls, building shelves, and just generally making the space beautiful and functional, I’m finally ready to show it to you all.

I’ll be spending the next few days glazing the new pots I made earlier this month and transforming the functional studio space into a showroom.

I’ll have pots for sale from this year’s making, centered on locally dug clay, plant ash glazes, and materials gathered close to home, or even here in my backyard. Much of this work comes out of my ongoing interest in making pottery that is connected to the land around me: clay from creek beds and roadsides, ash from plants and Walnut Family Bakery’s woodfired oven, surfaces shaped by place.

My garden has been a joy to watch this spring— right now the poppies are on full display, and the summer blooms of echinacea and coreopsis are just getting started. I started this garden just 3 years ago so every year I watch it grow, becoming fuller and more beautiful. The elderberry I grew from a cutting is flowering for the first time.

I’ll also be continuing a small tradition I’ve had for the past few years: a home sale of pottery and plants.

Alongside the pots, I’ll have bare root perennials from my garden, plus a few seeds. Many of these are native, pollinator-friendly, medicinal, and/or edible. It feels right to offer them alongside the pottery.

Plants available ($6 each, or $12 for very large clumps) :

Native medicinal and pollinator-friendly perennials
anise hyssop, American sweetflag, yarrow, skullcap, wild bergamot, echinacea, lanceleaf coreopsis, threadleaf coreopsis, early sunflower, black-eyed Susan, New England aster, purple-leaf salvia, dwarf crested iris, and garden phlox.

Herbs, edibles, and ornamentals
white-fruited strawberry, lily of the valley, pink columbine, feverfew, thyme, oregano, shasta daisy, blue and yellow bearded iris, and blue globe thistle.

Seeds $4
red bread seed poppy, broom corn, and more.

Whether you’re coming for pottery, plants, the studio tour, or just to say hello, I’d love to see you.

Toe River Arts Studio Tour
Friday, Saturday, Sunday — June 5–7
My studio: 308 Nichols St, Burnsville, NC 28714

You can park along Nichols St or Jones St. The studio is in the backyard.

Hope to see you this weekend,

Melanie

I have a full week of workshops and markets coming up, and I wanted to put everything in one place.

Next weekend, I’ll be teaching two outdoor, hands-on workshops here in Burnsville focused on working directly with materials from the landscape: wild clay, ash, local minerals, and the slow, practical process of turning raw matter into ceramic possibility.

These workshops are part skill-building, part experiment, and part invitation to think more deeply about where our materials come from.

Clay & Place: Digging, Processing, and Making with Wild Clay

Saturday, May 2 · 1–4:30pm
Burnsville, NC · $90
Work trade options available

In this workshop, we’ll begin with a short walk down to the creek, where we’ll dig blue-gray clay from a natural vein on the property. From there, we’ll move through the process of transforming raw earth into a workable ceramic material: identifying clay in the landscape, slaking, screening, refining, testing, and making small experimental pieces.

This workshop is for anyone curious about working with wild clay, whether you are a potter, sculptor, gardener, natural builder, or simply someone interested in a more direct relationship with local materials. Beginner-friendly.

Participants are welcome to bring clay from home if they have some they’d like to share or test.

Please note: this is an outdoor workshop, and accessing the clay site requires stepping down a small embankment and walking through a shallow creek. Wear shoes you don’t mind getting muddy.

Learn more + sign up

Ash & Earth: Intuitive Glaze Making with Natural Materials

Sunday, May 3 · 1–4:30pm
Burnsville, NC · $90

The following day, I’ll be leading a class on exploring ceramic surfaces using local materials.

In this workshop, we’ll work with ash, clay, and locally sourced minerals to create ceramic glazes that embrace variation, unpredictability, and discovery. We’ll begin with a simple overview of what makes up a glaze, then move into hands-on experimentation with raw materials.

This workshop will function like a small shared glaze lab. We’ll mix, observe, compare, take notes, and talk through how small shifts in material, proportion, and application can lead to very different surfaces.

This approach is especially exciting for artists working in electric kilns, where local materials and ash can open up more responsive, varied, and alive surfaces within oxidation firing.

Participants are encouraged to bring materials from home — rocks, clay, ash, or plant matter — to share, test, or incorporate into our experiments.

Both workshops are beginner-friendly, but this glaze class will be more helpful to those who already have experience and kiln access and want to expand their relationship with local materials.

Learn more + sign up

I’ll also be out at three markets in Asheville next week with pots from my recent body of work, including pieces made from wild clay and ash glazes.

Upcoming markets

Mother’s Day Market at Day Trip
Thursday, May 7 · 4–9pm
Asheville, NC
This will also be Day Trip’s birthday weekend, with food from Hail Mary.

Market at Nice Time Glass
Saturday, May 9 · 12–6pm
Asheville, NC
Nice Time Glass is celebrating its first anniversary with an artist market, glass blowing, tattoos, a plant sale, and more.

Artifact Handmade Market at Wedge Brewing
Sunday, May 10 · 12–5pm
Asheville, NC
A sweet makers market with lots of dear friends — a good stop for Mother’s Day gifts, handmade objects, and spring wandering.

Also coming up

I’ll be teaching a Turkey Wing Hand Broom workshop at Birdfoot in Burnsville on Sunday, May 17 from 2–4pm. We’ll learn to make traditional Appalachian turkey wing hand brooms using broomcorn and tampico fiber, and participants will leave with brooms of their own.

And in June, I’ll be participating in the Toe River Arts Studio Tour for the first time, June 5–7. For the past few years I’ve had a spring home sale at my studio, and this year that sale will happen as part of the tour. Fellow potters and friends Sam Harley and Lewis Denver will be joining me as guest artists. I’ll also have plants and seeds from my garden, and probably some seconds and special deals.

Thank you, as always, for following along and supporting this work. It means a lot to get to keep building a practice rooted in this place.

Hope to see some of you soon.

-Mel

All along the highways surrounding Asheville, there are drifts of a tall and beautiful grass. This grass is Miscanthus sinensis. In the fall, when the sun is low, its tufted plumes catch the light, glowing soft and silvery against the golden hills. Miscanthus’ beauty is what brought it here to Western North Carolina in the first place. It is not native, and it is now considered one of the most invasive plants in our region.

Miscanthus was introduced to Asheville in 1898, when it was planted at the Biltmore Estate. By the 1930s it had begun escaping gardens and moving into the landscape, where it thrives in disturbed areas: along roadsides, under power lines, in fallow fields. It flourishes in the very conditions our modern landscapes continually reproduce. Here it outcompetes native grasses and other prairie-type habitat plants, spreading by rhizomes and seed until entire hillsides become dominated by it. Particularly problematic for us locals is its flammability. These five- to twelve-foot grasses create dense stands that increase wildfire risk.

I became especially aware of this risk during the month I spent in Madison County at Township 10. Driving along Bone Camp Road on the way to the residency, I passed a hillside dominated by Miscanthus that had burned down, leaving tall yellow stalks standing against blackened earth and charred trees. A friend and fellow resident, Sam Harley, told me that twice, while driving that same stretch of road, he had seen the whole hillside on fire. I can understand why people here call it wildfire grass.

What does one do with a plant like this? Management is difficult. Its rhizomatous root system is tough; burning it makes it come back stronger. Digging, repeated mowing, and herbicide application are the standard methods of management. But driving along, I mostly see hillsides unmanaged by humans. I found myself wanting to restore some kind of relationship to a plant that, here in Western North Carolina, has fallen out of relationship. By relationship, I mean a pattern of use, knowledge, and attention through which a plant is made part of a living world rather than left to become pure backdrop or ecological menace.

In Japan, where Miscanthus is known as susuki, it carries very different meanings. It’s an important cultural symbol, especially of autumn, appearing in art and classical poetry.

Human relationships with the plant extend much further back, to the Jōmon period. For thousands of years, Miscanthus was used as thatch for roofs; when it was time to rethatch an old roof, the old material were spread on the fields as mulch and fertilizer.

Livestock also grazed on it. It belonged to a system of land management in which cutting, burning, grazing, gathering, and seasonal maintenance were all part of how landscapes were shaped. This system is called satoyama.

Satoyama, often translated as “village-mountain,” names a traditional Japanese landscape mosaic in which human settlements, forests, grasslands, fields, and rice paddies exist in dynamic relation. In this system, repeated human practices—cutting, burning, flooding, coppicing, harvesting, clearing—helped create the conditions for particular kinds of ecological richness to exist. Management was not the opposite of biodiversity. Here, it was one of its condition, to the point that the disappearance of satoyama systems has threatened many vulnerable species.

That idea is not unique to Japan. Here in North America, too, Indigenous people shaped landscapes through burning, pruning, sowing, harvesting, and other forms of ongoing care. Tending the Wild has influenced my thinking here, challenging the myth of untouched wilderness and insisting that indigenous populations have long been agents of biodiversity and ecological stewardship. Japanese satoyama and indigenous stewardship are not interchangeable but both challenge the myth of pristine wilderness, or the belief that the best landscape is one untouched by humans.

Seen from this angle, Miscanthus becomes invasive here not simply because it spreads aggressively, but because it exists outside any settled system of practice that might make use of it, limit it, or give it cultural meaning. For those of us here living with this grass, those histories are mostly invisible. We know it as a pretty grass in the landscape, or as a horrible invasive weed. But the plant carries older histories of use and maintenance with it, and those histories make its current disconnection more legible.

This has become important to me not only ecologically, but artistically. There is a tendency in craft writing to turn local material into a kind of innocence: the clay came from here, the ash came from here, therefore the object is naturally aligned with place. I understand that impulse. I feel it too. But localness by itself is not purity. A place includes its disturbances—what has been introduced, what has spread, what has outcompeted other forms of life, what has taken root in the cracks opened by human activity. To work with local material honestly is not only to celebrate what is embedded in a landscape, but also to reckon with what is entangled.

I think here, too, of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, which lingers in damaged landscapes and the forms of life that emerge there. Tsing asks what kinds of attention and relation remain possible within ecological ruin, and this has shaped how I think about material practice. Not every meaningful ecology begins in wholeness and not every form of beauty comes from intactness. Sometimes knowledge is found precisely in what is disturbed, at the edges of things.

For me, using Miscanthus began quite practically, as a glaze question. I was interested in achieving a locally sourced nuka glaze— a traditional milky-white ceramic surface made using rice hull ash. Because grasses are generally high in silica, Miscanthus seemed like a possible substitute for the rice hull ash traditionally used in nuka. I wondered whether it might offer a local parallel: an abundant material, a waste of sorts, perhaps even a small act of stewardship if gathered from the roadside and burned. But the longer I worked with it, the less it felt like a simple substitute. Gathering this grass along the road, burning it, screening it, mixing it with earth and minerals to make glaze, I found myself thinking not only about surface, but about what the material carried with it.

I have been trying to understand how a pot might hold the record of where it comes from by materially participating in the conditions of a place. I want these surfaces to carry evidence: of geology, of labor, of fire. Satoyama helps me think here because it names a world in which use and care are not automatically opposed. Of course, not all use is care. And not all management is reciprocal. Human intervention can flatten a landscape just as easily as it can sustain one. But it can also prune, burn, open, cycle, and maintain.

Working with local clay and plant ash has made me think of ceramics less as a mode of personal expression than as a practice of relationship. As I explored in my previous pieces, materials come from specific places. They push back. They have limits and refusals. They ask to be worked with on their own terms. Burning Miscanthus for glaze does not solve the problem of Miscanthus here. At best it is a small act of use and attention within a much larger ecological setting. I do not want to overstate what a bucket of burned grass can do against an invasive species. What interests me is smaller and more modest: the possibility that using this grass can become a form of attention to the landscape and its histories, and that this attention can become a small restoration of something lost.

Leaving Township 10, I drove again up Bone Camp Road and stopped my car beside the hillside scorched by fire. In the evening light, the burned stalks glowed gold against the blackened earth. Spring had arrived, and I could see the green of new growth starting to take hold in the soil. What struck me was the beauty of the burned stalks themselves, the way they were striped by the fire. I thought about how, in so many ways, this landscape was also the pots I had just made: this clay, this burned grass, this act of burning impressed on the pot as geological crust or a kind of skin.

And I thought, too, about the contradiction. Intellectually, I understand this scene as ecological damage: a species out of relationship, overstepping its place in this landscape, contributing to habitat loss, reduced biodiversity, and fire risk. But I also saw within it another history. In one context, these scorched stalks speak of neglect and invasion. In another, they might signify seasonal burning, maintenance, even care. Burning is not gentle. But gentleness is not the only form care can take.

Using this grass to make glaze, I want my pots to be more than simply locally sourced. I want them to hold these contradictions, these histories, these questions. I want the work to become a material record of entangled place.

A reminder that place is not purity. That care is not always gentle. That fire can destroy and create at once. That what remains after burning is not always absence.

This piece grows out of a recent body of work exploring local clay and plant ash in Western North Carolina. You can see the work here.

I’ll be teaching two workshops on working with local materials the weekend of May 2-3.

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to follow my writing and studio work, please subscribe below.

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Further reading / sources:

The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Tending the Wild by M Kat Anderson

Ash Glazes by Phil Rogers, particularly the section discussing Katherine Pleydell Bouverie’s research on different plant ashes. She’s an absolutely fascinating person and might one day be the subject of one of these essays :)

https://www.deeplyregionaljapan.com/single-post/not-just-a-designer-plant-miscanthus-the-grass-that-nurtured-japanese-society-and-culture

https://miscanthus.cfans.umn.edu/habitat/miscanthus-japan

https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs018.pdf

For more information about satoyama, there’s a 3 part David Attenborough series about it available on youtube:

My shop is now open with early access for subscribers.

Enter

This collection comes out of my recent residency at Township 10—made with clay I dug from the property and my own backyard, and finished with glazes developed from local plant ash. This body of work feels special and unique because its specific to that place and time— it also feels like the start of a new direction in my work that i’m excited to keep exploring.

Early access opens at 10am EST. Regular access opens at 3pm EST.

Thank you for being here—it means a lot to share this work with you first.

—Melanie

Me at Township 10 digging the clay, surrounded by the invasive Miscanthus grass I used in some of my glazes.

Standing over the fire pit, watching the Miscanthus I had gathered go up in flames, I wondered what it would become once it entered the process of ceramics.

When I arrived at Township 10, I came with a sense of uncertainty. My proposal was simple but open-ended: to work only with materials I could gather myself around the property—clay from the ground, ash from plants, minerals from nearby. I didn’t know what the clay would allow, or what the surfaces would become.

What I was looking for was a kind of material knowledge—a way of understanding the landscape through working with it directly. And I found that the materials would constantly defy my expectations and surprise me.

The clay I dug from the property let me know its limits early on—cracking under my hands, resisting certain forms, requiring constant compression and adjustment. On the wheel, it refused the shapes I was used to making. Plates collapsed, narrow necks tore. Working with it meant changing my approach, finding a compromise.

The glazes moved in their own direction as well—opening the kiln was always a encounter rather than confirmation. Ash from the furnace, blended with local clay and feldspar, melted into stony, iron-rich surfaces—matte, almost crystalline in places. The clay itself fired closer to brick than anything I had worked with before. Unprocessed clay revealed itself through cracking and variation, shrinking around small stones embedded in its body.

The glaze I made using ash from Miscanthus in particular held a tension between intention and discovery.

I began those tests hoping for something like a nuka glaze—a soft, pale, satin surface traditionally made using rice hull ash. My hope was that I could achieve a similar effect using ash from the invasive Miscanthus grass that grows so beautifully and prolifically throughout the county. What came out of the kiln during my testing was instead rocky, dry, almost pumice-like—more geological formation than traditional glaze.

I didn’t expect to like the failure, but I did.

The surface held onto the ashy character of the material. It refused to become something smooth and familiar. It felt less like failure and more like a statement: this material has the power to express itself in this way.

Narrowing the work to what was immediately available—what could be dug, burned, or gathered on site—began to feel less like a constraint and more like a structure. Historically, pottery has always been shaped by place: by the underlying clay, the minerals nearby, the fuel available. Working this way, even within a contemporary studio, brought that relationship back into focus and allowed me to feel a sense of belonging in a long human lineage of land-based craft.

Despite the variability and constant testing, the final kiln revealed a body of work with a clear visual language—a palette that felt specific and cohesive: dusky purples, terracotta, mottled grays, deep brick reds. In many ways, the surfaces echo the woodfired, reduction-cooled effects I’ve been after over the past few years—but achieved in an electric kiln, through entirely local materials.

Looking at the finished pieces, I find myself tracing them back to the conditions that formed them—the shovel in the earth, the burning grass, the feeling of spring. Each piece carries those moments in its surface. Clay and ash become not just materials, but records—of place, transformation, and time.

Somewhere along the way, the work began to resemble something I already understood. I am a gardener, and I think of gardening as a form of tending—an ongoing relationship with soil, seasons, and the lives that move through a landscape. This process felt similar: less about control, more about attention and response.

I’ve been wanting to make space for this body of work to exist as a whole before it disperses.

I’ll be sharing it as a small online sale on my website this Friday, April 3.
Subscribers will receive early access at 10am, with the sale opening to the public at 3pm.
EDIT: The sale is now live here:

link

All of the pieces were made from materials gathered during my residency at Township 10 in Marshall, NC. Because of that, this is a body of work shaped by a specific place and set of conditions—one that won’t be repeated in the same way. At the same time, it feels like the beginning of a direction I’m committed to continuing at my home studio in Burnsville.

* * * *

If you’re interested in working this way yourself, I’ll also be offering two in-person workshops at my home studio:

CLAY & PLACE: DIGGING, PROCESSING, AND MAKING WITH WILD CLAY
Saturday, May 2 · 1–4:30pm
A hands-on, outdoor workshop focused on digging, processing, and working with clay sourced directly from the local landscape.

ASH & EARTH: INTUITIVE GLAZE MAKING WITH NATURAL MATERIALS
Sunday, May 3 · 1–4:30pm
An experimental approach to glaze making using ash, clay, and local minerals, centered on observation and material response.

(Full details and registration information are linked.)

At the fire, watching the grass collapse into ash, I remember asking myself what it would become once it entered the process of ceramics. Not just what kind of glaze it would make, but what it might carry with it. The surfaces that emerged weren’t what I had set out to find. But looking at them now, it feels clear that the work was never really about arriving at a specific result— it was about following a material far enough to let it become itself.

And in that process, finding that what emerges—however unexpected—already holds the place it came from, and already belongs.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing to my newsletter Groundwork.

-Mel

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The clay here is everywhere.

It’s the tan packed earth under the kiln shed. It shows up in the tire tracks when the tractor crosses the grass. I find it when I slip my shovel into the perennial beds, digging plants and moving rocks.

I chose to collect my buckets of clay at the top of the property, where a small creek cuts through the earth among tall clumps of miscanthus grass and spicebush. This time of year the spicebush branches glow with tiny green flowers—one of my favorite plants to gather for arrangements, lime green pops among the yellows of daffodils and forsythia.

It’s been three weeks since I arrived for my residency at Township 10, a beautiful site nestled in the hills of Madison County, North Carolina. Since my last residency here in 2024, I’ve stayed on as the gardener—designing new ecological flower beds by the pond, creating a fire pit garden space, growing vegetables for residents, and slowly getting to know this property and the people who pass through it.

During my time here I wanted to slow down my practice and work more closely to the ground. My residency goal has been to make work entirely from clay and materials gathered on site.

On my first day in the studio I did nothing to the clay I’d dug except add enough water to make it workable between my hands. That evening I sat at my table with the freshly dug earth, pulling rocks from it one by one. In this immediate state it was difficult to work with, cracking along the edges and needing to be coaxed into holding a form. Still, I wanted to lean into the limitations of the material and see what shapes it might take under my hands.

Over the next week I processed another batch of the same clay using the method I use at my home studio, where I also dig clay from the creek behind my house. I added water to the buckets of earth, mixed it with a drill and paddle attachment, screened the slurry through a window screen, and poured it into drying racks.

At home I’ve built a stack of racks for processing clay. Here—thanks to a tip from lead resident Sam Harley—I discovered an old rack under the barn, left over from the early days when East Fork Pottery began its operations on this property.

By the second week the screened clay had dried enough to work with. I’ve been surprised to find that it throws quite well. Returning to the wheel after some time away, and after spending so long refining this clay, I felt a deep sense of curiosity and play in the studio again.

As before, the clay makes its limits known. It doesn’t like being too wet, or too dry. Plates crack along the rims. Some pots collapse. But working with the clay as it is means adapting my making to what it allows. I’ve found that these constraints are strangely freeing—when certain possibilities fall away, the path forward becomes clearer.

In my handbuilt work I’m learning to embrace the cracks. I press the stones I had screened out back into wet slabs. A new body of work has begun to emerge, and I’m excited about it.

I’ve been unloading pots from the bisque kiln today, and I’m loving this clay—how orange it fires in the bisque, how it deepens to a brick red at cone 6/8.

Much of the residency has also been about slowing down and watching spring gradually unfold here. Wood frogs quack in the pond, where parts of the water are dark and dancey with little tadpoles. I sit on the porch with Sam, listening to birds cast their songs across the field, trying to recognize them by their calls. Between studio sessions I’ve been tending compost piles, preparing garden beds, and watching spring unfurl.

Marjorie Dial (my friend, fellow resident this session, and the owner of the property) kept expressing her surprise that this clay was here all along. I think we often forget how abundant clay is, especially in the piedmont and mountains of the East Coast— clay is not so much a precious resource that you need to go out and look for so much as it is the ground itself. Dig a shovel anywhere on this property and you will hit clay. The key is just getting to know which clay has what properties, and you find this out by being curious about it, gathering it, working with it in your hands, putting it to fire. Working with clay here in this way reminds me that materials are all around us, and that many of the things we need in this life can be made by hand, gathered out in the world, if we’re willing to put in the time and work.

During this residency I’m no longer asking myself whether time spent outside at the edge of the woods with a shovel is time lost making pots. Instead, I’ve begun to see putting my shovel in the ground as a necessary step in creating the ceramic work I want to make right now. Limiting myself to this place while making gives new meaning to my work, and impresses the fact that often everything we need is already plainly in front of us if we take the time to notice it.

And I’m enjoying what I’m noticing– the smell of tulip poplar roots as I dig the earth; the warmth of the sun on my skin, the breeze across my face; my ears full of birdsong and the sound of my own footsteps in the leaves as I breathe hard and work the shovel into the earth.

My residency here ends next week. I’m looking forward to bringing these new pots and material knowledge back to my home / studio, and continuing my conversation with clay there as I start a new making cycle in my new space.

-Mel

PS— My studio will be a stop on the Toe River Arts Tour, June 5–7. If you’re local to WNC you can come check out the blue-gray vein of clay in my backyard in person and see what’s going on in the studio and garden. I’ll be joined by guest artists Sam Harley (currently here with me at Township 10) and Lewis Denver, a fellow local materials enthusiast.